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Mandrake 8.1 Released
Loke and several others wrote in with notes about Mandrake Linux 8.1. Release notes are available, or download an .iso, or just order it. Looks like it includes KDE 2.2.1, which is pretty impressive...
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Mandrake 8.1 is called "Vitamin". It comes with a bunch of new features such as MandrakeFirstTime that lets users centralize their Internet parameters and subscribe to the new MandrakeOnlineServices (personalized updates advisories, depending on your system). Also this is AFAIK the first Linux distro to offer the journalized file-systems XFS, Ext3, ReiserFS at the same time! Last but not the least it offers the beautiful KDE 2.2.1 (with antialiasing in standard) and GNOME 1.4.1. While the previous releases were very oriented to end-users, this new one offers excellent features for server use.
My father-in-law lives in Japan and is very interested in breaking free of M$. The one thing that is really slowing him down is easy, out-of-the box Japanese support. That is to say, he wants to be able to create word processor files in Japanese--he's American, so he understands English just fine, but getting KWord or Star Office to understand Japanese text has not been easy for him.
He also has an ATI Radeon, which the beta version of 8.1 didn't seem to catch.
:Peter
2001-09-27 13:32:28 Linux Mandrake 8.1 relesed today (articles,news) (rejected) :)
Alot of work has gone into this distro, do yourself a favor and check it out
I just downloaded the 8.1RC isos yesterday and am not even done burning them when I read this!
Now, I get to go back and download the new ones.
Oh well, not like I have anything better to do with my bandwidth.
Ok, so I've got 7 CD of applications, many of them do the same things, and many other aren't the most recent version... Did they really think that I will go through the complete 7 cd trying each application to see if I need it?
When I need something, I go to freshmeat/sourceforge or even google, and I'll a least have a description about the soft that I want...
Just my opinion!
Mandrake is really a very impressive distribution. It really is easier to install then any Windows version I have tried (possibly excepting XP). They way they are going I would not be surprised to see Mandrake become the de facto standard for end user Linux (not just newbie).
And that is without mentioning the new KDE!
I'm not a lazy user, but Mandrake is the first Linux distro that I have been able to use without calling a friend every 5 minutes to figure something out. I first installed 7.2, then 8.0, and I have been able to use it for most things. Now that I am getting familiar with it, I am starting to learn to compile my own apps, and set up some not-so standard hardware, like my scanner and sound card. I started as a newbie, but I am learning more and more about it all the time.
Mandrake is a great distro for beginners, but they don't hide everything, so that if you want to learn stuff more in depth, you can.
Lazy? No. Lack of knowledge because I have used Windows for so long? Yes. Learning more everyday about Linux, but I was still able to get the basic system up and running without help. Now instead of editing a stupid text file for 10 hours with no luck, I can go-back and figure that stuff out on my own time, instead of ripping my hair out.
I've been running 8.1 RC-1 for about a week. Yep, I've had a few bugs (the graphical login makes me login TWICE before it lets me in on my ThinkPad). However, KDE 2.2.1 is sweet, running XFree86 4.x.x is a HUGE improvement, and the whole thing feels more integrated than other distros I've dealt with such as RedHat (i.e.: the software packages are more likely to "play nice" with each other). Yes, it IS easier for novices to use, but that doesn't make it any less powerful than the distros that are a pain to install, configure, and maintain. Contrary to the view of some folks, Mandrake is not producing a "beginner's version". Hats off to Mandrake for a great distro!
Life is short: void the warranty.
I've heard from the Mandrake support lists that 8.1 is really buggy and has been bothering a lot of people. I'm hoping they got those bugs worked out and stable before releasing it. I'm currently using 8.0 and love it, but am weary of upgrading to 8.1 from all the problems that I've heard about. More than likely I'll just upgrade all the stuff manually. It's nice to see KDE 2.2.1 in there though. How much more memory does it use now though :)
I have no signature
Even if Mandrake is very much desktop-oriented, this should not necessairly mean requiring a monster. I'm using a K6/2 350Mhz and the CPU power is fine. Not blazing fast, but ok. On the contrary, the 64Megs of RAM are way too little. I don't use GNOME/KDE (I prefer plain WindowMaker), but at the moment the situation is:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232
-/+ buffers/cache: 44100 18140
Swap: 66524 27508 39016
27M of swap is not the end of the world, except that I'm using old recycled disks, with a throughput of 3-5 Mb/sec. And with this disks, you can FEEL the system swapping.
What suprises me is that I'm running the same stuff I was using with the old releases, but nevertheless RAM usage is going up!!
Even if RAM is cheap, I don't see any reason to go the Microsoft way. Featurithis is not a need.....
Please keep this in mind, all you software developers...better many small utils which do stuff than one big monster....
PS: I can't consider Mandrake a server distro, there's too much bleeding edge stuff. This is nice for the desktop, but stability is affected. I'd stick to Debian for a server.
In the release notes, we read:
MandrakeSoft is proud to announce Mandrake Linux 8.1 as the newest alternative to Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
Wow. It's hard to find two operating systems as different as MacOS (pre-X, like the versions that videographers would use) and Linux. Pushing Mandrake as a "alternative to Microsoft Windows" or "Macinstosh" may be a little premature at this stage.
I think it would be more accurate to call Mandrake an alternative to RedHat, Debian, SuSE, etc. But not MacOS or Windows. Not until I can install fonts by simply copying them into a directory. Not until my TV-out works on my Matrox g450. Not until my wife can open up the PowerPoint files that her professor has on the class web site.
When we jump the gun like this, and people (I'm talking people like my parents, not my fellow engineering students) try installing it themselves (as an alternative), people in general will get a bad taste in their mouths when they perceive that they have less functionality from their computers than they had before.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
I just installed RC-1 a week ago. Is there a list of the changes between RC-1 and the final? It doesnt appear to me to have any significant ones.. If this i true I'll burn the 8.1 final images, but won't bother re-installing.
Although the announcement doesn't seem to mention it, it seems that 8.1 is only available for i586 machines. The best PPC users can get is still 8.0
Too bad...
no I just frankly don't have the time to spend 6 hours in vi because once I get it all done and the way I want it a few of my friends who are linux beginners call and ask how to fix things, like can you imagine tring to help people who have never even used dos on a werid debian installtion? its pain statking and I respect that of you for enjoying that. but I like mandrake and I like using. and teachign linux is fun because it is almost impossible to use linux without starting to mess with configurations. I would rather have that be after installion than during installion. that way I don't have to leave my phone off the hook to go to sleep when a distro has a new version because I live in a dorm.
They're usually in /etc/rc.d and most distros start things that aren't needed. Also, if you have a hackish bent, go to the source directory and "make xconfig" to see how the kernel was built. Are there drivers compiled in that aren't needed? Bloat can be fought!
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If you don't like our menu structure, run menudrake and choose Action/Menu Style/Standard menu and you'll get KDE/GNOME original menus.
:))
And nobody forces you to use Mandrake tools
Come on people, we need more mirrors. Post em here!
Better yet... the DeSEE algoritm...
RedHat and Mandrake aside, we are all Linux users and should work together. Personally I prefer Slack; however, this is not the reason I write. I just think that if you are going to get online to slam someone you should do it in a manner that does not make you look like a fool. I would recommend putting Linux aside and visiting some grammar sites like this one.
Sure, it doesnt have a snazzy graphical install with all the bloat, but it is a simple to use text based menu system. Was my first distro, and still the only one i use.
Its never been a nightmare to install for me. You may just have trouble with dependancies if you install using the expert method and dont have a clue what anything needs, but then there is the newbie option and normal menu method.
Slackware isnt hard to install.
Trust me :)
I may be offtopic, but since we're talking about Mandrake I thought I'd ask. Has anyone been using Mandrake Corporate Server 1.0? I've had my eye on it for a while for use as a small web, email and Samba server to run off my (firewalled) cable modem. However, I like to read reviews of distros before I go ahead and buy or download them. Thanks :)
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I've used Mandrake 8.0, among many other flavors, and have yet to find one that is honestly less of a hassle than my trusty Win98 partition.
I still support Linux, and I'll be a fan for awhile, but it's still got a long ways to go. If I wasn't a full-time programmer who also likes to do a little coding at home I doubt I could even say that much. After all, the only real use I've found for linux is for development. Everything else is done better, faster, sooner and more reliable on windows and macOS.
The main reason I have a computer at home is for games anyway, and we've all seen what happens when a company attempts to deliver games on linux. (*cough*Loki*cough) Until a linux distribution is released with support for my immense library of windows games, it'll remain on my secondary partition and booted only when I feel like coding.
-Space for rent
Could Slashdot please quit doing this. Those of that read this site generally know where to go to get downloads of linux distros. All you are doing is killing the site.
Mandrake's FAQ says that versions of Mandrake compiled for non-Pentium processors are often available for download. This seems to be the case for older versions (I think you can get 6.0 compiled for 386es), but not for anything recent.
It should just be a simple compiler flag, so I might be able to rebuild the distribution myself (if I had a fast enough box to do it on). It's a shame that Mandrake is 586 only, because it's a pretty nice distro, even without all the graphical stuff which is its main selling point.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Has anyone installed the RC1s on Thinkpad 770s?
When I tried installing 8.0 on the Thinkpad 770, it would not recognize the trackpoint mouse.
I'm about to choose my first Linux distro and I'd like to know which one has the better package manager, RH or Mandrake? I know Mandrake uses a modified form of RPM but is it better or worse?
:)
As for the Debian apt-get folks I know its a great package manager, I use it myself on Mac OS X (thanks to fink, http://fink.sourceforge.net) but Debian as a distro itself is not the simplest to setup and I'm way past the tinker stage.
So my questions for Red Hat and Mandrake are:
1. Do they check dependencies well?
2. Sometimes I like to compile from source, which distro is that more likely to break things or cause trouble on?
3. Which one installs more stuff in total, RH or Mandrake?
4. Is it at all possible to use apt-get on RH, Mandrake easily? I know its been done but is it more trouble than its worth?
Thanks in advance.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Most of the commercial ones are "kitchen sink" distros that install and turn on everything to save the average user, who probably wouldn't know "make xconfig" or "/etc/rc.d" if we hit him over the head with them, the hassle of looking for them. A newbie distro such as Mandrake is especially prone to this. Debian and Slackware are (or were, I run SuSe but am having hassles w/rpm, may go back to slack or deb) less prone to this. At least with Linux and *bsd we get choices.
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The DistroWatch web site has been updated to include the latest Mandrake release. Look at the Mandrake page for all the details. To see how it compares with others, visit the Major Distributions page. Have fun!
The word is that the ProSuite edition of 8.1 is as much 8.1 plus Corp. Server II. That was posted somewhere on MandrakeForum.org ...
... helpful for businesses...
Corp server is a bit outdated now - it works (ok) but looking into 8.1/enhanced might be the right route - it comes with an "enterprise" kernel
www.easylinux.com Based in Germany, I demo'd their product at LW '01 in NYC. Pretty spiffy KDE-centric distro, fairly easy tools. Just released version 2.4. Not sure how their versioning works (ie, does the 2.4 indicate a 2.4 kernel included? Dunno).
But don't take my word for it, dig Evil3d's review.
Hope this helps.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
I've been using Mandrake, loved it.
I've been using RedHat, loved it.
I am using LFS, married it.
You say something is good in this distro, something is bad in that distro. Make your lives easy and get the most out of your machines. Make your own distro! I did it and now I'm running the very latest, the very best, and only the things I want to run. Nothing more, nothing less.
Nothing personal guys, but Mandrake is the worst of the bunch. This distro might work ok on your 1ghz 512mb pc, but 8.0 ran like crap on my 128mb P200mmx. And yes, I know what I'm doing, it's running at runlevel 3 ( no graphics ) with a reduced set of rpm hand selected on installation. It even screwed up the installation by never installing the
Mandrake has too many bells and whistles that attempt to hide the fact you are running UNIX. Call me a hacker, but not having the standard BSD unix tools by default really annoys me to no end ( ftp, telnet, and many others were not installed without individual package selection ).
I have been running linux since 0.9.4 in '92-'93 on at least one PC in my house, so I do know what I'm taking about.
All of this emulating m$ makes me want to go BSD.
I've been using Mandrake 8 for almost 6 months now and I'm sure 8.1 will be great. You say Mandrake is for lazy users? Well I don't think any Linux distro is for lazy users, since those lazy people use Windows...
Who cares about which distro is the best one? Mandrake has a high share of the desktop market and I'm fine with that.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
but what is the point of a distobution if you don't use the tools? BTW why don't you guys contribute some Kontrol modules to KDE, your configuration utilities are way better than SUSE(who is the closest to you in usability/ install)
and anyones for that fact. at the bare minimum, integrate the mandrake controle center into the KDE Kontrol center, mabye even replace the KDE tools with the corisponding drake tools. user drake is much better than user manager, and hard drake has no comparison in KDE, if you make it look like it belongs in there then I think your desktop would look alot more unified.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
May I suggest that you might have heard that BETAS are buggy (and such), not the final version. It's somehow hard to belive othervise, considering the fact thet:
1) 8.1 just came out
2) I haven't heard anything of the kind so far.
When Mandrake started, I saw it as a reaction to RedHat which was declining in quality. RedHat was missing some pretty crucial stuff, like KDE, It was Mandrake's aim to provide a RedHat++ or something. Sort of like Linus wanting to make Minix++ originally.
Since then, RedHat went really downhill and Mandrake really took on an identity of it's own. This is the power of open source, even if it kinda sucks for RedHat.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
The page swapping of RC1 was impossible to do any realy work. With a PIII700 and 512MB or ram I kept getting buffer underruns trying to burn XP to a disk, had to go to since use mode and cache the disk in ram by running string image >/dev/null.
I couldn't wait to get this POS off my desktop.
Ever thought this bloke could be speaking English as a 2nd or 3rd language.
If so, how do you compare?
As if norwegian is anything but poorly spelled danish. I suppose it figures when universities in Norway were a novelty until some 100 years ago. Where would you be without oil money, I wonder...
Who says it just came out today?
GODDAMMIT! I downloaded the isos for 8.0 last night and installed it this morning. At the end of this install, the pc boots, I login, test the network connection by trying to go to slashdot. Set the gateway, get to /. and see THIS as the first story. Just wonder-fucking-ful. Oh well.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
If Grandma is going to install Linux, it better work right out of the box. The only way to do that is to have it install everything.
If you're smart enough to know you don't want everything (and you obviously are), then you have to remove what you don't want. How is Mandrake supposed to know what YOU want installed vs. me? In order to cover all of the possible installations, they'd have to make a "Custom" install choice or something. Oh wait, they do.
Would Grandma like to edit startup scripts or spend half of her day, everyday, clicking the "X" to remove the "Would you like to sign up for a Passport now?" balloon dialogue she'd get in Windows? (Does anybody know how to stop this without actually getting a Passport?)
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
my first experiance with linux was slackware in '96 I was a major hassle just to get a base system installed never mind the GUI and I learned alot from that experiance but it was extremly time consuming and frustrating sense then I have installed a hell of a lot of distros and versions Mandrake has gotten to the point that casual users who don't have a clue what they are doing can acually install it and USE it yes they might not have a clue about anything thats happening under the GUI but thats mandrakes goal just like your average winows user doesn't have a clue
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Slackware is the best distro because it is lean and its not centered around a specific window manager. IMHO its the easiest to upgrade and work with. Too bad not that many people have this same feeling.
An important point here
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I've got both Mandrake 8 and slackware 8 loaded on my machine, and I've used slackware exclusively for about 2 months now.
/etc/rc.d/rc.modules file to uncomment the modules for hardware/services you need, and that the xf96config script is simply horrendous -- I had to grab settings from my Mandrake partition to get it to properly configure.
Mandrake is great for the end user or the linux user who doesn't want to delve to far into the configuration -- or learn about the standards. (This is not meant to be a disparaging comment -- this has been primarily how I've operated on linux) However, I wanted to learn a little more, and I discovered that HOWTOs and tutorials that detailed changes in initialization and configuration scripts failed me when I tried to apply them to my Mandrake box. With Slackware, however, they work perfectly. I was able to get sendmail, fetchmail, and procmail working in a matter of minutes, and printing was more consistent and easier to configure.
In addition, I have tried, and tried, and tried to compile many a program on my Mandrake box in the past year, and only about 25% of the time do I have success. With Slackware, I've had better than 75% success (with the massive exception of KDE). And compiling new kernels is much easier -- as well as adding new hardware (I had my new Olympus digital camera downloading images via USB within minutes). (My slackware kernel and init scripts take a matter of 60 seconds to boot -- compared to 2-3 minutes on my Mandrake box -- and that's even after recompiling the kernel to disable support and using DrakConf to eliminate unnecessary init scripts!)
The trade-off, of course, is that you have to take a little more time to understand what it is you're doing and why -- but once you've learned a few basics, you'll find many tasks much simpler and easier to implement.
Installing Slackware these days is fairly easy -- the menu-based installation took me a bit more time to go through the options than Mandrake's point-and-click interface, but everything I wanted -- and no more -- was installed successfully the first time. My only beef is that on first boot you have to go into the
All-in-all, I would recommend Mandrake for those who want to simply use their Linux computer (and what use is a computer if you're not using it?) and Slackware for those who want to optimize their computer and minimize resource use -- or learn SysV init scripts and standards-compliant Unix.
great I have to download a japanese version of redhat just so I can veiw kanji ?
thats where I think many distros fall down I want english as well as japanese and German
just being able to veiw japanease chars is a pain let alone printing them
anyone know an easy way to veiw CJK in a email+ browser ?
regards
john jones
Ever thought this bloke could be speaking English as a 2nd or 3rd language.
If so, how do you compare?
Yes it is bigger and Yes probably slower. However, I typical user that is used to Windows Bloat will see very similar functionality and speed improvements without the popup ads (XP's cool new features). Linux must keep up with the Evil Empire in many things that "typical" users will think they need. They also must balance the Linux configurability for us geeks. It's a tough job.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James
Those tracking "unstable" with Debian had it a long time ago (with ease).
Does anyone have any information on how to upgrade a :-)
Mandrake box w/o toasting the existing
configuration? Forgive me, I'm a FreeBSD user who
is accustomed to 'make world'.
Chris
Although we are not an officially list mirror (checking into that later) our server at mandrake.netnitco.net seems to have everything but the ISOs so far.
yes. i ve seen some people with tats of Tux. i had a page bookmarked with some pic of two Kiwis who got it tattoed on theier forearm, but cant find it atm :(
ive not see any tattoes of Chuck the BSD devil though.
&speaking of the patrotic tattoos...inthe Houston Chronicle there was a picture of a guy getting "GOD BLESS THE USA" inked on his forehead. UGH!
I agree completly. When I started working for my current employer(a midsized ISP in WV) we had 1 Redhat webserver that no one knew how to configure. During the 6 or 7 months that I've been here, we've uninstalled the RH Box, and a few NT boxes in favor of Slackware boxen. I've instructed the techs how to learn/use/love linux, with varying degrees of success. The systems admins and I have been pushing to install Apache in favor of IIS, which has given us some security issues in the past. Upper management (and our webmaster) have been resisting, and I think that it's more because they are familier and comfortable with Windows.
Fear not, brothers! We're fighting the good fight!
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Anyone know whether or not it is necessary to get iso for 8.1 if you already have RC-1? Would MandrakeUpdate patch/fix RC-1 into the equivalent of 8.1?
great I have to download a japanese version of redhat just so I can veiw kanji ?
No, the distribution is the same. The difference between the CDs is just the default intro screen before you select languages, and AFAIR also the text installer. Graphical install in Japanese works fine with the standard Red Hat Linux distribution - and if you select support for Japanese, you can view it without any problems in e.g. mozilla.
Wow - this is probably the first time I've seen 100+ comments about a Linux distro release with fewer than 10 (what I could see) "Debian rules/apt-get kicks ass/blah blah" posts. Maybe they're all just modded way down, but I don't think so. Maybe they're too busy trying Mandrake 8.1? :)
creation science book
Things like the network set up and sharing the network with others on the lan make this a winner. I used to set this up by hand, now I basically push a couple of buttons. Also Menu configuration has never been easier. I can use multiple desktops, including blackbox and enlightnment, as well as the standard kde and gnome.
You could have predicted when 8.1 was to be released based on the periods between betas and the fact that they released Release Candidate 1 on the 19th. They never make more than 3 betas. They didn't even have an RC-1 last time, if I'm not mistaken. The site also explicitly said (in pre-orders section) they were going to release 8.1 by end of september.
Don't expect 8.1 for the PowerPC to come soon. Sept. 1, I placed and order for 8.0 for the PPC and I still have not recieved it. I popped off an email to service@madrakesoft and still have not gotten a reply. If I were a business thinking of switching to Linux and I couldn't get a reply from a "what's the status of my order" email after a week from sending it - I'd be thing twice about it. But that's another issue altogether.
I called them yesterday, and the guy said that they were experiencing technical difficulties burning the CD's. They were supposed to be mastered in Europe but because of recent events (WTC attack?) they've moved production here in the U.S. and it is going s-l-o-w-l-y. He said I could expect the CD's in about a week or so.
Given that, 8.1 could be a while for PPC. I can't wait for it though. It looked really easy to install on The Screensavers and could be a great system to cut my teeth on Linux with.
One thing that I have never understood about Mandrake is why all the graphical setup tools are written using GTK+ rather than Qt?
It's plain that Mandrakesoft have tried very hard to make them look the same as the KDE Control Center, using a very similar theme to the KDE default highcolor style, and with KDE as the default desktop, I don't understand the choice of GTK+ at all.
Using Qt would make it far easier to integrate these setup tools into the KDE Control Center and provide a completely consistent look and feel across the whole desktop. Perhaps more importantly, it would reduce bloat. GTK+ is not a small library, and having to load it in addition to the Qt that KDE uses increases total memory usage quite considerably. If the setup tool used Qt, then they would use the same shared copy of Qt as KDE.
Both SuSE and Caldera (both of which also ship KDE as the default desktop) have Qt-based graphical setup and configuration tools, and they integrate seamlessly into the KDE Control Center, giving users a single place to look for all their configuration settings. Why is Mandrake different? From an engineering (and consistency) point of view, the choice of GTK+ just doesn't seem logical to me.
RUN DEBIAN.
No, seriously. Try it. It doesn't try to say "look at me! I'm not like UNIX at all! I want to be like Windows!" - it's honest about its roots. It's a bit harder to get started with, I admit, but once you learn it, you won't want to use any RedHat-derived distro again.
Go get the floppy images and net-install, or download an ISO and do a base install, then update yourself to Woody (or Sid, if you're daring - I run Woody on servers, Sid on workstations). Then use 'tasksel' to install tasks of your choice. GNOME and KDE are available if you want them.
By the way, where can I get an ACTUAL Mandrake 8.1 ISO? I don't want it - but we have a student aide who wants to install it, and the 8.0 release is hanging up after loading the driver module for his Adaptec SCSI card. (You'll note I've never had a problem like THAT with Debian!)
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The upgrade treadmill they have people on is rather striking, they service they offer is compiling all your software for you and selling it every few months. Are they really adding anything new that can't be gotten anywhere else? no. Do some people like it that way? yes. Essentially they're just adding new software updating versions etc and saying "here's our latest greatest distro" which is fine, but people need to recognize it for what it is. Every couple months is a "new distro!" no it's not a new distro, it's the same stuff that was in the last just updated.
Where is in your opinion that fine difference between SuSe and Mandrake distro, which makes Mandrake (and not SuSe) distro "bloated", "kitchen sink", and "newbie"?
Mind you, I'm not saying that SuSe is any of these, I just fail to see this great difference in before mentioned categories.
If you said things as "mandrake leaves you too much choice" (as in tons of different GUIs, or printer quieing systems to choose from), or "Mandrake evolves too much between releases", I could understand it, but I really don't understand why SuSe would be any less "kitchen sink" than Mandrake.
I understand that live update actually works now (for some people). Much needed great news.
In the past, most attempts to grab rpms (urpmi or apt-rpm) from official mirrors would fail on dependencies. Made linux unuseable to me.
So does mandrake have a useful dependency gathering package manager pointing to a coherent database, yet?
After hearing all of the wonderful things about APT on slashdot, I thought I'd give Debian a try. I didn't really expect that they would go through such lengths to get me to install using something other than a downloaded ISO (first there was the network install, then the pseudo-image, and finally the ISO). I mean I have a broadband connection, what better use for it than to download 650 MB ISOs? Long story short, I had some issues with Debian and my network card, and me forgetting the proper parameters, so I was unable to even check out APT. I suppose if I wasn't also interested in trying Slackware, I probably would have tried harder to get Debian to work.
So now it a was Slack's turn. I was a little apprehensive, because of my Debain experience, but I did a full install, and Slackware probed for and found my NIC, so I had no problems at all. When 8.0 first comes up, it's configured with a 2.2.19 kernel, but in about 2 minutes, I was able to reboot into 2.4.5 (which also comes with 8.0). Upgrading to 2.4.10 was a breeze, as well. I quickly upgraded to mozilla9.4, galeon0.12.1 (which is excellent now, IMO), and installed gnucash, and now I'm a happy camper.
If you've been around linux for a while, Slackware is definitely something to check out. I wouldn't suggest it for your first foray into the linux arena, however, unless you like jumping into the deep end of the pool. For first-timers, Mandrake is just too easy to install and use out of the box.
Frogs are primitive animals - so the occasional extra toe is not that unusual. But this is very unusual.
The point is, if you pay attention to what you're using, it can be blazingly fast on really old machines. (I'd avoid StarOffice and its ilk, though...)
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
It's just the one I'm using now. But I'm looking at debian and slackware. The latest gnome and kde won't install on my suse, rpm barfs and dies when I try, so I'm looking at apt-get and the old standby of tarballs. Ah, if I had but worlds enough, and time, to build gnome, kde, and new kernels, from source.
Best Slashdot Co
IMO MandrakeUpdate should do the job just fine. Of corse, nobody from QA really tested this, because RC1 or betas were never considered "supported"
Btw, MandrakeUpdate is one of packages which actually got updated in the last moment, so it may be wise to update it manually before doing anything else.
...until it can open my KWord files.
Dont blame Mandrake (or any linux distro) for not being able to open MS Office docs, blame Microsoft for refusing to port it. Which, its seems, they can't. Probably because it has been coded specifically to Windows. So, I guess Windows sucks as an OS, because it cant run my bash shell scripts.
What you are describing is basic xenophobia. People dont like it because they perceive that they have less functionality. When in reality, they dont like it because they dont understand it because it is different. The average consumer displays a disgusting amount of fear of having a computer that is different. I feel no need to encourage this.
And to the die hard MS Supporters(tm), no, the Gov't shouldn't force MS to port Office, the consumer should. The Gov't should just punish MS for obviously abusing a monopoly.
I'm thinking of throwing linux on there in a bit, but find myself hesitating because of several reasons. One is bloat.
Try NetBSD instead. It's a very bare-bones operating system, so only the bare essentials are installed by default. Once that's done, you can pick and choose exactly what you want from a beautiful package system.
(I ran a mail/ftp/web server for months on a 230 meg drive with this. And had half the drive free when I moved it to different hardware.)
--saint
Du mannen, når skal du lære å holde kjeft?
I'm not a lazy user, but Mandrake is the first Linux distro that I have been able to use without calling a friend every 5 minutes to figure something out.
Amen to that. It also seems to have newer versions of the kernel and apps, nice centralized configuration utilities.... this is moving in the right direction to be a good desktop OS that doesn't require a CS degree to use, let alone administrate - and it generally just modifies those same sacred text files you can still edit by hand with (editor removed for flame-prevention). I know there are guys on here that have used Linux for YEARS, but don't knock Mandrake - it's a great way for people to learn Linux.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
From what I can see on Mandrake's website, this is a release candidate, not a final.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Mandrake as a distribution. I like that they are quite a bit less conservative in their distributions than RedHat or Slackware tend to be.
Mandrake 8.1 looks like a great step forward though, especially with their single-user install options.
I mean, it was just released less than two weeks ago. Usually, major versions of OSes should use versions that are more thoroughly tested (this is not some kind of critical patch). Why the rush?
¦ ©® ±
you can also just type "text" at the boot prompt when installing mandrake and the installer looks a lot like the slackware/redhat installer of old :-)
You'll never have to worry about finding help with new software, either. By time Debian releases the distro, all the questions you'll come up with have already been answered. You'll have to check last years archives, but all the questions and answers are there.
Has debian moved to the 2.x kernel yet?
Just wanted to get input. Can you get server wizards from online or the only way to get them is to buy the server cd's (Like $150). I looked online but I could not find the wizards.
3 CD's? There's now a 'supp' cd. This better be good....
m00.
SUSE is very good for a first linux installation.
I've been considering purchasing Mandrake's More expensive Power Pack Suite (or whatever they call it) just for the Via Voice Software.
I'm mainly wondering:
How good is IBM's Via Voice? Reliability, Usefulness, Etc.
Does it come with the full version or a trial version?
As a Linux Newbie, should I attempt to download the free version and buy Via Voice Separate, or Just buy the Full Mandrake Distro.
As far as I can tell, Via Voice is the only Non-Mandrake App. included with Mandrakes Distro that I can't download for free. Is this correct?
Thanks in Advance
Linux is a the best thing since sliced ham, I won't deny it. But I find Mandrake a very watered down linux distro. I think it's great for beginners, In fact my first distro was Mandrake 6 which ran pretty well on my 75mhz packard bell. I highly doubt that Mandrake 8 would run as well. It's been kind of a double edged blade. As the entire thing has gotten more user friendly. It's gotten more bloated. I think it is starting to get to the point where you can go and use linux without learning a thing about it. This is great for newbies, but how do you learn anything if you are dependant on GUI tools. I would be fine with it if it was bug free. But the real problem is, it is aimed towards Joe Shmo but Joe Shmo would never understand how to edit his modules.conf to fix his TV tuner which Mandrake 8 completely failed to configure (tho kudos for detecting it.. never seen that happen). Or perhaps the great job it did by using a kernel that moved boot devices after /dev/hdd (hde, hdf, etc) back to hda and hdb and then after installing uses a kernel that switches them back. Kernel recompiles always seemed to break it with tons of errors on bootup. I could see it now...
VFS ROOT not mounted?
'WHAA? WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY LINUX!? THIS SUCKS XP RULES!!'
Failed convert. We need users, not people who get so frustrated they don't even try. Worse when they go and try new distros not starting in runlevel 5, How will they know what to do? One could hope that they'd fix such things in 8.1, but i found 8 a little too buggy. For me, I'll stick with a slackware base and just compile my packages. While mandrake is on the right track and doing a good job, Linux shouldn't be buggy, that's just not linux. I could see this being more viable through some tweaking and a lot of bugfixes but right now I'm not about to recommend it...
-Scott
> The Few, The Proud, The Frozen.
When all freedom is outlawed only the outlaws have freedom
I've never had any of the problems you mentioned.
However, I'm not nearly as experienced as you, since I have only been using Linux since '97. Perhaps if I had more experience I would have trouble with:
If you did individual package selection, how could you miss telnet and ftp? I've installed several Mandrake/Redhat boxes and never missed the BSD tools. Even things like sed/awk have always made it. Perhaps you need to pay more attention during the install?
I would say that you screwed up the installation by not selecting the tools and options you wanted.
Or maybe Mandrake has created the first sentient graphical install, and it just decided that it didnt like you.
Poutine is from Quebec, Canada, not France. No such a thing exists or was heard in France.
Apart from that, i do not see the relevance of your post. I have been trying several distros, and Mandrake was by far the greatest for the end-user and interest new people to get involved and use linux. A great development was done by the french team (and other nationalities)
Moreover, if u check the origine of people actually participating in kernel development, you will find a lot of french people and europeans involved. Whether u like or not...
You post is just basic moronic ignorant and uneducated racism. period./
>
little bugs... *watches byte rate go down from 60*
4.0k/s...3.2k/s...1.4k/s....0.3k/s..0.1k/s
arrggghhhhhh!!!!
*looks for the person who submitted the article to strangle them*
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Call me a hacker, but not having the standard BSD unix tools by default really annoys me to no end ( ftp, telnet, and many others were not installed without individual package selection ).
Personally I think Mandrake are to be gratulated for leaving these out. ftp and telnet are... well, not very good. There are far far better alternatives available.
ncftp is far more powerful than plain BSD ftp, even having command and file completion a la bash.
ssh is the way to go, and the more that people are discouraged from using telnet, the better. This alone (I think) merits removal of telnet from the standard install.
netcat is far more flexible and powerful than telnet.
Blind adherance to the notion that 'if it was in BSD 4.2 or SysV then we must have it in Linux too' is one of the things that holds Linux back. There are very often better tools and better ways of doing things today than were available 10, 15, 20 years ago. As Linux users and developers we should be evaluating what still works the best and what is better replaced by more modern tools and ideas. Whilst you can keep the old tools around for compatibility, sometimes it's better just to remove them in order to migrate people to the new tools, and to reduce the amount of cruft. I think ftp and telnet are perfect candidates for this.
Personally I can't wait until filesystem ACLs become part of mainstream Linux, then I can do away with the less-than-great traditional UNIX permissions scheme. :)
So Im going back to Slack - the installation isnt that hard.
My 2 cents
The only problem I have had is the lack of header files installed, so mostly when I want to compile something, I need to find the *-devel package, and install those first. As I get more and more into development, I may tire of this, and want to change distros. But Mandrake has given me a good start on the road away from MS, and I give them all the credit for creating a distro that normal people can understand.
Only read if you completely understand the following rule.
I AM NOT TRYING TO START A FLAME WAR!!!
All will admit (ALL!) that Mandrake is the best of the lot. But for some reason I find Debian to be cleaner and quicker. But out of the box, Debian has no journaling fs support or support for my ATA100 card. Can this be done in Debian? Of coure. I don't think anything can not be done in Debian. But if I have to spend two days doing it.... then it just aint worth it. Hopefully SID release will resolve some of these issues, so for now....Mandrake it is.
It's alway this way. Mandrake has excellent hardware support, but it's loaded. Debian is clean...but less out of the box hardware support.
Such is the troubles of a geek.
Kudos to the two best OS Dist available.
Mandrake and Debian!!!
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Yeah I'm hep, but ... too bad there's no Linux distro designed to "get-me-going" with work gotta get done outa the boxx --- some amusing artdecco admin-tools crappola's OKey too --- and still inspires/drags my lazy Lusr_azz UPWARDS thereafter: scripting/compiles ... Know what I mean??
rayhartNOSPAM@qwest.net
Actually, Slackware doesn't use SysV init scripts to startup, it uses BSD-style startup scripts (hence the lack of run levels and symbolic links galore).
Red Hat is the greatest.
Yeah I went ahead and installed mandrake 8.0 .
What a piece of junk.
Impossible to connect to my dsl line, the hardware detection utility crashed the system worse than anything windoze has ever done.
But the worst part was during the setup, it was so poorly engineered that with one errant button push it started reformatting my entire windows drive (sorry folks, I also need to get serious work done). Fortunately, I was able to recover most data. But jeez, at least with dos fdisk there are redundant controls to protect against such accidents.
I'm sure that people reading this will accuse me of disloyalty to the cause, but sorry, that was my experience. I'll try playing with that distro later maybe, but only after unplugging any drive that may contain important information.
evanchik.net
I have been a long time Red Hat user, durring the 7.0 problems I tried Mandrake as an alertenative. 7.2 was very nice, and 8.0 wasn't too shabby. I didn't like some things with 8.0, but I could deal with it.
8.1 is a mess.I am going to give it a few days, then I might move back to Red Hat. I just don't like the BS RH appears to be pulling with there RPMs. *VERY* few FTP sites are carrying there update RPMs. I think its on purpose, to get you to use the RH network. Once again, another story :)
until (succeed) try { again(); }
"I discovered that HOWTOs and tutorials that detailed changes in initialization and configuration scripts failed me when I tried to apply them to my Mandrake box."
/usr), and everything works together very well. And there is nothing that stops you from building your own kernel from scratch and installing alongside the original kernel: I have 2.4.9 reconfigured with exactly what I need and it works beautifully...no problems. And you can't possibly tell me it's easier to configure a kernel on Slackware than on Mandrake.
Please cite something specific. So far, I have not run into any situation where manpages and HOWTOs were not helpful. The fact of the matter is that some of the docs (especially the HOWTOs) are a bit outdated, and generally the folks at Mandrake have created better/more efficient/more customized implementations of those configs, so you don't always find things exactly as it is written in the HOWTO. However I have always found HOWTOs to still be helpful in understanding configuration etc.
"In addition, I have tried, and tried, and tried to compile many a program on my Mandrake box in the past year, and only about 25% of the time do I have success."
??? So far I have been able to compile EVERY tarball I've downloaded (with the exception of a certain engineering program which seems to have been designed for a BSD system). For example, I was able to compile Galeon, which requires a ton of gnome libraries. Often the reason why rpm-distro-users get frustrated with tarballs is because they fail to install -devel packages for the libraries needed. I can almost guarantee you'll find every library/devel you need either on the Mandrake CDs or in the cooker. I have a lot of tarball packages in addition to rpm packages installed on my Mandrake system (many of them installed into
As far as configuration, you still have to give the Mandrake developers a lot of credit. I was completely wowed as I watched the Mandrake installer automatically install my network card, and set up my DSL connection for me without me having to touch a single config file. A lot of people like to rant about graphical configuration tools just because they're insecure about their l337 h4x0r-ness unless they can tinker with config files in VIM. In the real world, people don't need to spend a lot time tinkering with config scripts to get their systems working right. It might be a waste of valuable time that could actually be used to do something productive. And kudos to Mandrake for coming up with a distro that takes a lot of work out of configuration, and yet is not limited in power.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
I downloaded Mandrake 8.0 for the ppc and installed it on my 266 imac. It's a vast improvement in user-friendliness over linuxppc, which I tried a year ago. It recognizes the graphics card, is generally much slicker and complete, etc. That said, I had to change kernels and use bootx (rather than the default yaboot) to get the thing to work properly, and it doesn't recognize my usb zip drive. And with my 64 megs ram, it's a bit slow. So, this is many steps closer to a "linux for the mac-owning masses," but I can't yet recommend it to any of my many mac-using friends who aren't technical professionals. There are just a few rough areas to be smoothed out yet. (Besides the install, the inability to recognize hfs+ partitions is a big hurdle to practicality in the mac world.)
We have a winner for run-on sentence of the month!
Ok, you try and get the average person to recompile the kernel to get the latest versions and fixes. You try and get them to install one of three different journalling filesystems. You try and get them to do an install of the latest version of XFree86.
If you can manage to do these, then Mandrake's possibly not a distribution for you. Mandrake's for people that can't do these sorts of things and wants to be free of MS and for people that can that don't want to bother with doing it. To call it an upgrade mill is silly- you DON'T have to buy the distribution if you don't want to (you CAN upgrade it and the whole thing is available via download as the baseline is GPLed in the first place...) It's just easier and in many cases cheaper for someone to purchase the thing off the shelf.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Until nVidia offers them, you can get them via MUO.
tom (mandrakesoft)
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
I just installed Mandrake 8.1 Release Candidate two days ago. I don't know if your post is a troll, or just sadly misinformed. I'll take the bait...
That's one of the risks you run of keeping an old computer. I just upgraded from a P166 to a P2-350; I find the Mandrake's speed to be more than adequate on the P2, but I never would have installed it on the P166. More than adequate means that it will be years before I will need to upgrade my hardware.
I too was suprised to find telnet missing, but I understand the rational behind weaning users away from unsafe tools. Besides you say that you have a set of rpm hand selected on installation. Well, whose fault is it then that you forgot to install telnet and ftp?
That's funny, I just come from planet BSD. I enherited a new computer, replacing my aging beast that's been running FreeBSD for the past 6 years. I would have stayed with FreeBSD but getting X to work with an nVidia card was a joyless hell.
Don't get me wrong, I am a freebsd enthusiast. Even if I end up being a debian user, I will sorely miss the ports system. But for me, a newbie Linux user, Mandrake has a strong appeal. It works. And it works now on my hardware, without days of fidgeting. My printer works, my video drivers are installed, my sound card was auto-detected. If that's what you mean by emulating Microsoft, bring it on.
In the past trying to do this was pretty much a mess. Things broke and it took the better part of the day as my CDROM drive churned. Has it gotten better? Does anyone have experience doing this recently? Say from 8.0 to 8.1?
I probably just care about getting the latest KDE.
Telnet and ftp still serve secure purposes.
ftp is useful in scripting shell scripts. If you're d/l'ing files via anonymous ftp in a script do you need the features of ncftp, nah. I suppose wget or similar would work there tho. However, FreeBSD ftp has been improved to where it has most of the ncftp features, so it would make a better, smaller base system choice
telnet is useful for things like cisco routers and such that haven't had ssh support until recently (and for scripting queries to said routers), but especially for not telnetting but connecting to ports (telnet host port). Telnet has been immensely helpful in connecting to pop3, smtp, http, and issuing the commands manually to see the exact output when you're trying to debug a server.
A parody of a parody!
(argh, stupid lameness filter!)
there are many colors in the Linux rainbow
out the box, and also no uses aspell/pspell for spell checking.
I quickly upgraded to mozilla9.4
Wow! you have mozilla 9.4!? I don't even have version 1 yet.
I keep seeing complaints like:
"Mandrake is too bloated and I'm a linux expert so I should know."
Actually if you're a Linux expert, especially a lazy Linux expert then Mandrake is quite nice. It ships with a lot of nice stuff and it's highly configurable at inatall and after. The kernal is very modular. The install is very tweekable. In fact Mandrake 8.1 is the only distro that I have been able to get to work correctly with ReiserFS as root on an ATA100 drive along side another ATA66 along side a SCSI software raid along side a SCSI CD writer and an IDE CDROM. All that with pmfirewall and freeswan working fine INSTALLED AS AN UPGRADE. Yes I had to tweek a few things but they were fairly minor.
Considering that I got to choose what I wanted to install, what services I wanted to run at boot, what runlevel I wanted to start at and what window manager I wanted to use (each preconfigured with menus for my installed components) Mandrake 8.1 is a dream. Plus Mandrake ships with some nice config tools and MandrakeUpdate so that I can easily update over the net. I admit that I edit config files by hand on occasion. This is not MacOS by any means. I also use webmin for some tasks and tweeks. That aside I think Mandrake 8.1 is a very friendly but powerful distro. It's not just for the desktop and never really was.
If you don't have the patience to roll your own distro (the only true way to escape Linux lib dependancy hell) and you don't have time for something like Rock Linux then I think that Mandrake should be considered along with Debian as the Lazy Linux Expert Distro TM.
Oh, and BTW, those complaining about Mandrake not running well on Pentium 120s with 64 MB of RAM... Why bother leaving the Linux 2.0 or 2.2 world at all? You don't see Win95 users complaining that they can't run WinXP - OK maybe you do. Anyway these people fall in that category and should actually use one of the many mini distros that are perfect for such a machine.
I've been using Mandrake since 7.1 and love it. It's amazing the improvements that are made between releases. When I took my box to an installfest put on by the local LUG it took the guys there an hour to get the sound working right with my on-board chip. With Mandrake 8.0 it just worked. I now have a slightly old (500MHz/128MB) laptop that I ended up wiping windows from. It's been upgraded to XFree86 4.1.0 + KDE 2.2, and runs great. I am hoping to upgrade it and my desktop box tonight. Hopefully I'll be able to convert my ext2 to ext3.
What's the proper way to upgrade my machine from 8.1 beta to 8.1 full?
awesome stuff man :-)
:-)
:(
just put in my order at your site..
:D
but 1 question i had is, what type of shipping is it going to go through.
there was never an option to select what type of shipping..
/me wonders how teh new kde is like
i like the aqua theme in gnome though.. that's what i used right now... there some bugs though. like when you hit alt-tab, it won't list all teh apps, it will just auto scroll..
btw, when we install the update.. are we going to have to reconfig our xfiles and stuff?
btw, did you guys increase your printer and scanner and tablet databases?
i got my tablet working in linux, but it's not working anymore. very odd, but still haven't been able to set up my printer (canon bjc 240), scanner (epson 1640SU usb), or my cd burner (internal).
i'm hoping those get set up with the new mandrake soi never have to boot to w2k
l8rz,
My biggest praises of Linux Mandrake is that is is easy to install, it looks
very nice, it is easy to learn to use. On the other hand you can still do
things the same old ways if you chose to do so.
my first experince with linux was Red Hat 5.1 on a 486 with a SCSI cdrom
drive, it took me 7 hours just to get to the cd rom part of the installion
because I had to read and tamper with the scsi settings because I didn't
know them. and now that box still runs perfect. I'll admit it was hard and
I had no one to ask.
Now I do my installions of linux with out asking, but we are coming upon
an age of new linux users or people who wanna be linux users who have never
partitioned thier hard drive before, reinstalled windows because they accidently
crashed it beyond repair, and have little or no desire to read into it. which
is a very big reason why people are recommending Linux Mandrake to newer
users because it gives the one of the easiest installtions and most intuative
methods of use I've seen. If I am wrong about that tell me and I will stand
corrected.
One last thing I said I like mandrake because I am lazy for one fact
because I like to mess around with the settings and everything else after
its installed at my leisure not during an installion all at once
scripting to CISCO routers... that's exacly the kind of stuff a newbie does. If you admin a net, you know your tools, if you use a workstation better not have IIS up & running (GET ...default.ida anyone)
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
It's KDE 2, XFree86 4, 2.4 Kernel, and the rest of the supporting cast that make all the linux distro's look good. Mandrake is okay, but I don't see it being a killer. It's easy to install and great for newbies, but not crippled in any way.
I prefer Turbo or RedHat myself, haven't tried Slackware though.
As you apparently don't recall, Ximian support for Mandrake is always about one version behind. Generally speaking, they add support for the current version of Mandrake about the time Mandrake releases Beta 1 of the next version.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
yes, read my post a little futher down. Its a mess, make sure you have both CDs ready to go or you will have a slew of dependice problems.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Look guy, I'm going to go with Bero here. I've been running Red Hat for a very long time, and I've never had problems finding mirrors sites. I've also never had them a few months ago. If the sites didn't have it at that time, that's their problem, not RedHat's.
For the record, I'm both a Windows 2000 and Mandrake user, about 50/50. I'm a technical writer, print and web publisher, web backend developer, and Java programmer. So my computing needs are pretty well-rounded. I'm actually quite OS-neutral, adapting to whatever's necessary to get the job done. And guess what? I prefer Mandrake to Windows 2000, because it's *easier to use.*
Right now I mostly work with the Win 2K that came with my laptop, only because I haven't taken the time to install Mandrake. Now that 8.1 is out, I might actually find the hour or so to do that.
I'll withold comment on Macs, since I haven't used them seriously since System 6. Perhaps you should do likewise with your Linux comments.
Linux HAS become bloated. Well, distros anyway. We used to bitch and moan about bloat in MS products, and now the shoe is definitely on the other foot. I have little access to new disks/hardware (I'm sure someone will now spout "but diskspace is cheap you tard !"), and moved off of linux to *bsd PRECISELY because of the nasty bloat. You guys (zealots?) just won't admit you're all guilty hypocrites that once complained about bloat in "everyone else's" stuff, and now you can suffer with it. My sympathies with those of you who recognize this problem with most distros already.
Does anyone know if it is possible to upgrade from Mdk 8.0 to 8.1 via internet?
I don't have a cd-burner, but 2.0 Mbit/sec connection
Telnet is still an option. Just need to do an expert install. I will have to check but I think ftp is an option as well.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
cool man
Isnt this why people buy these new Pentium 4s with 512 megs of ram??????? YES!! To run more powerful software, stop running a 386. I'm tired of software lagging drastically behind the hardware because some people are afraid of upgrading.
Upgrade your computer and you wont care if Linux is a gig and has every feature in the world.
If you want no bloat, use Dos.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I've had a lot of bad experiences with Mandrake 8.0 (as with most other Linux distros I've tried). Well, some good experiences too, but the bad ones are more annoying. Most problems are with the package tool that tries to imitate APT's functionality, but fails miserably.
For example, you type "urpmi kdebase" (or something like that), then it suggests about 50 additional packages, as it should, and starts downloading them. After downloading for half an hour, it tries to install them, but runs into RPM dependency problems or file conflicts. Installation fails. Ok, you resolve the conflicts manually, and try to "urpmi kdebase" again. It removes all the packages from local "cache" and downloads them all again for half an hour. Aaaaagh.
The software manager GUI totally sucks. It can perform operations for half an hour, but doesn't display a progress meter of any kind (just a "busy" indicator that flashes sometimes even when the program is not busy). The only way to get some status output is to run it from command line and watch the output of wget that the software manager uses internally... If the transfer gets stuck, you won't know about it. All operations take an eternity, and usually end up in conflicts, especially with the Cooker RPM repository. It's really frustrating.
It has dozens of other small problems. Most of them are just annoying, some are really confusing, some are just broken. For example, it uses the framebuffer console driver by default. Well, when I type "startx", it gets jammed, and only *reset* helps.
When I installed 8.0, I had to re-install it three times, I think. Once because in the last installation phase, it tested X, and it was ok, but when the test exited, my screen went blank. *sigh* I also noticed - too late - that installing the 2nd CD later with the software manager simply doesn't work. Takes eternity, produces conflicts, and all installation operations all slow as hell. I found it much much easier to re-install everything again than to struggle with the software manager.
Most other issues were mostly GUI-related useability problems. Many things are just confusing, not simple enough, or don't work as smoothly as they should.
Not that other Linux distros are much nicer. RedHat still misses ReiserFS, getting updates (such as KDE) takes quite long, and it's up2date sucks even more than Mandrake's urpmi. Debian might be nice, but its installation is hell. The APT-system seems to work much better than other package systems, but using it is everything but easy (and I'm not really a computer newbie). I'd rather do something productive than use days just learning how to use a package system. Corel Linux's installation was great, but it didn't have updates, and couldn't really be upgraded with Debian packages safely. SuSE...well, miscellaneous problems, but not terribly bad, about equal to Mandrake. The control center program...what was it again...oh, the "YAST2" (can't you just call it "control center"???) was rather bad - sluggish, couldn't configure my SB AWE32 sound card in any way, etc, etc.
Yeah, I reported some of the Mandrake 8.0 problems, but not all (writing even a few reports takes quite many hours).
Stop making stupid excuses, either you compile the kernel yourself, or you dont use Linux because its too powerful for your weak machine
Weak machines cannot run state of the art software, Thats why people upgrade.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm on a 400mhz machine, so obviously its not your CPU, YOU NEED MORE RAM!!! NO OS CAN RUN ON 64 megs of ram!!
Windows 98 was made in 1998 when 64 megs of ram was NORMAL!!!
Normal today is 256 megs of ram, UPGRADE!!! Linux Mandrake is not made to compete with Windows98, its Competiting with WindowsXP and OSX, both which require about 256 megs of ram, which means Mandrake requires 256 megs of ram.
I have 256 megs of ram and it runs smooth as hell, much faster than Windows 2000.
But hey if you only have 64 megs of ram i guess its going to run slow as hell eh? Trying to run next generation software on first generation hardware is not going to work, At least not if you run KDE, You can try running blackbox.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I thought that an appropriate closing for this long sentence would have been: "...and then one time at band camp..."
Since Qt costs money for proprietary products, and GTK+ can be used at no cost even for proprietary products (LGPL vs. GPL), this could be a compelling argument if Mandrakes tools are closed.
If not, I'm lost, since it makes no sense in choosing a desktop based on one toolkit, and your tools based on another.
just wanted to say that it's mandrake that converted me. i tried for days to get red hat and debian to work right with all my hardware (which isn't exactly obscure) with little luck. evidently, they both had major issues with my NIC. anyway -- i downloaded the mandrake ISO's, burned em from my win machine and the installer saw everything. in fact, i even had a friend of mine who is a die hard mac user (and far from computer savvy) really interesting in getting the PPC version. if there's any distro right now that's really going to push linux into a position as a viable desktop alternative, it's drake.
I installed Mandrake 8 and they were considerate enough to NOT install the kernal sources. What Linux distro installs without kernal sources? A really crappy one that's what.
Mandrake 7.1 everyting on my system worked. I installed 8 and no sound with messages about missing modules...no problem i think i'll just do a quick recompile...now where did they put the sources they're usually...wait, not there...hmmm ok, lets see if it's any where else...nope..WHAT no kernal sources?
And as if that weren't bad enough I can't compile ANYTHING on this system, I apparently have missing libraries even though all the libs are installed. I'm stuck using binary packages, too bad some of the software I want to use is only available in source form.
And when i updated all my rpm's all kinds of things broke, like the logon screen and javascript in konqueror...however it did break whatever was makng samba not work...that's one plus of upgrading i suppose.
any way, i'll stick with redhat for now. Had nothing but good luck wth that distro.
Mandrake 8.1 is by far the best linux distro, ever. This is what a linux distro outta be... complete and up to date. I'm still downloading the ISO right now, but hope to have it burnt and installing on my machines early this evening. If you haven't done so already, do yourself a favor and download this. Even the Red Hat purists will agree that Mandrake 8.1 is about as sweet as linux gets. This is the OS that both your workstation and server will want to run.
Mandrake, you've done a hellofa job. Thank you for what can only be described as on schweet package of software.
I noticed that it includes JFS, but I also noticed that they discouraged the use of JFS in the last beta b/c the combination wasn't stable yet. Anyone know whether or not JFS is fully stable in 8.1? Anyone know which of the journaling file systems would be fastest for plain desktop work (not a lot of media streaming or anything)?
... it's for _play_. My car is for work.
But I deeply dislike the default mandrake cute fuzzy blue and yellow for everything -category icons. Replacing them with the standard gnome category icons (of much higher quality IMHO) would be a pain to do manually.
It would be nice if the icon set/style used in the mandrake menus could be switched.
pinkNoise
KDE Kontrol Center - User's personal settings
Mandrake Control Center - System configuration
They're very different things and that fact should be made clear to the users.
Like the old adage in realestate "location,location, location", the FSF needs to focus on an Office Suite. A pretty desktop still doesn't get my work done.
does mandrake installation allow acclerated graphics support right out of the box?
i'm using ati rage 128 card and debian woody installation doesnt provide it nor does sid/unstable. and i'm really unhappy about this..
i think they're not including some modules in the kernel images they have. i have do to do it myself. not that i cant but other modules dont work properly and i dont time to waste on things like that. but i'd still rather use debian in favor of any rpm since it's so much cleaner.
my blog
Telnet? Are you nuts?? SSH with PublicKey authentication.
Mem: 62240 60456 1784 1056 1124 15232
You may think you are short on memory, but your Linux kernel thinks it can afford to use 15232 + 1124 kb = 16Mb for disk cache. I haven't seen your system, so it may very well be swapping like crazy (especially considering the bad rap the 2.4 VM system has been getting), but in the best of all worlds these numbers could mean that your Penguin has in its infinite wisdom thrown out 27Mb memory that isn't used much to improve disk performance (through caching).
Cheers //Johan
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Excellent! This is just what I've been waiting for!
At last they realise that they will only get enough beta testers if there is a spell checker and fonts to make a word processor, well, a word processor we can use.
well, KDE seems to be moving into system administration because I can manage my users, configure printers, set up a new kernel config file, set up my log-in.
and any way, there is no reason why personal settings and System configuration should be seperate. they should be together and have the same look & feel. that is what makes a system seem smooth
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
And I master it, I would say. Then again, I went to college in USA for 3.5 years.
Whether or the guy speaks Enligsh as first, second, third or fourth language doesn't really matter that much. The fact of the matter is that the guy wrote something unintelligeble with hopeless punctuation. My French is right around the same level as his English, I'm estimating. I don't go to french websites to partake in discussions - because I know that I would not be making a lot of sense.
I forgive him his bad grammar, to some degree. However, his punctuation seems to be consistenly bad. Bad punctuation often means that your thoughts aren't crystallized yet - and thus should not be shared with the general public in a bit.
Oh. And I was a bit out of line.. Crap happens. And thanks for posting logged in. Self-righteous AC's get to me, from time to time.
Stop the brainwash
Deltic, as defined by every dictionary I can find, is either of the definitions above, and nothing to do with the way people spell.
Its a serious question, albeit offtopic. It is NOT flamebait.
Never used any linux. Took a chance. Conclusion: NOTHING IS MORE SIMPLE THAN INSTALLING MANDRAKE and everythings goes wwwway ffaster than ANY WINDOWS (tried them all) on my 'slow' (?) Pentium 200MMX Laptop. And with Corel Wordperfect and Matlab, nobody will ever convince me I have to buy any new hardware. SIMPLY THE BEST